Let me sumamrise my response thusly: 𒁞

I understand trimming input fields is typically a useful default, but in this case this prevents me from searching for a space. So maybe it'd be worthwhile to add a `if (trim(str)=="") return str` exception or something similar?

• meodai

  today at 7:06 AM

  oh right, good catch

This is excellent. I prefer Unicode characters over images when possible, like arrows for example, but often struggle finding the exact one I need. Here I can sketch ‼ what I need and then narrow down my search. This is just perfect, many thanks. UX is easy and intuitive. Goes to my bookmarks.

Like, who knew this is even a character: ᆚ

Very cool concept and execution, well done.

I don't quite understand what is going on with the "spotlight" UI concept - I can click around on the characters and it highlights an area and it also reloads the landscape local to the character that I clicked on, so I can sort of traverse the similarity landscape this way. But I feel like I might be missing some part of the visual metaphor?

• huflungdung

  yesterday at 10:08 PM

  It’s just a cool visualisation

• teaearlgraycold

  today at 3:26 AM

  Agreed. Nice aesthetic. Terrible design.

  • siddboots

    today at 5:05 AM

    Well, that wasn’t my conclusion at all to be clear!

Bookmarked as an excellent tool. I use it to find alternatives to "forbidden" characters in filenames. For media files, mostly.

To visually compare characters you need to map them to glyphs; what is the glyphset and how much of Unicode does it actually cover?

Seems like search doesn't work for Japanese kanji. Search works for https://unicodeplus.com/U+2F8F But doesn't work for https://unicodeplus.com/U+884C

I'm not dyslexic, but this is what I imagine dyslexic hell is.

Very impressive that I can sketch a character in the top-left and get a close match. That's a real highlight showing that there's more going on under the hood than a big look-up table.

"Everything runs in your browser."

That's cool. The sound effects seem like natural thinking sounds. :)

Several models to compare.

Ouch, my back button

• SpyCoder77

  yesterday at 10:51 PM

  Yeah lol

• iqfareez

  today at 2:40 AM

  well you can right click the back button

> visual similarity

> SigLIP 2

Maybe visual-semantic similarity is more appropriate? Nonetheless the design is fantastic

• meodai

  today at 3:14 AM

  True, thanks for the feedback

Cool but maybe consider a different name? If I want to recommend this tool in a few weeks' time there is approximately 0% chance I'm remembering it's called something like "Charcuterie", despite the clever bit of wordplay.

• emmelaich

  today at 3:05 AM

  The title of the page is "Charcuterie — A Visual Unicode Explorer" so a search would bring it up. [edit - tested in a incognito page]

• jorisnoo

  today at 8:01 AM

  I love the name!

I like the animation work and sound, it really gamifies the experience. I question the usefulness though. But it could make a fun game experience if it were to let people match by colour or align emojis related to each other.

• meodai

  today at 3:12 AM

  I use it to find icons I likr

This is cool but the characters are awful small on my iPhone 14 Pro. Decent bit of wasted space too. Why are the characters in the previous history list (on the “rim” so much bigger than the characters I’m actively exploring?

Love this. I hope it works with Japanese kanji too, because sometimes I forget the exact character but remember a similar one.

• meodai

  today at 3:13 AM

  It does

  • amake

    today at 8:47 AM

    It only seems to work for some subset of CJK characters. I haven't been able to figure out why some work and some don't.

    For instance 叱 and 明 both seem to fail in the same way: U+1F996 T-REX in the upper left corner and the URL fragment fails to update.

anyone know how this works? i assume just rasterizing and embedding?

This is impressive! Thanks for sharing.

WOW! What a lovely way to explore the character map.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22361257

This is quite remarkable. Great work.

Very cool concept and execution.

Sounds delicious!

The name sounds really bad in French. Charcuterie is a pig butchering shop, usually associated with messy bloody stuff. The verb “charcuter” also refers to surgery done poorly.

But yeah I guess the pun makes it work in english

• globular-toast

  today at 8:08 AM

  I looked this up as I was sure boucherie is the butchering/bloody bit. I think I'm right, charcuterie means essentially the same thing as it does in English.

  I didn't realise it was a French word, though, and thought the char was referring to smoking, even though I know not all charcuterie is smoked. But, in fact, char means flesh (chair) and cuterie means cookery. So it's more like "flesh-cookery" if we wished to translate it.

WOW. JUST WOW ‼

Reminds me of early 2000's web design with Flash websites. Those were good times.

• ebruchez

  today at 1:04 AM

  Oh no they weren't!

Love the name, very clever

This tastes delicious. The sound is perfectly restrained and animation is intentional. I wish more apps were as playful as this.

Anyone else think of the film 'Hangar 18'; specifically the alien language they find on the UFO?

[dead]